


And They Did Unfold

by Shay_Fae



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Child Abuse, Consent Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Just Generally Unhealthy Choices, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Recreational Drug Use, The Prank, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:05:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27460147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shay_Fae/pseuds/Shay_Fae
Summary: "He's never gonna forgive me.""He will. That's not what I'm worried about."Or winter of 1976: Sirius Black unravels
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 57
Kudos: 213
Collections: Marauders





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Be aware that consent is not great in this story, the way it often is between teenagers with poor communication skills. That said, please be cautious if this is a trigger for you. My email is in my profile if you have more specific questions. 
> 
> Title comes from the song _Bashed Out_ by This Is The Kit.
> 
> _And so the outside, it bashes us in_  
>  _Bashes us about a bit_  
>  _Feel it tugging you, ploughing you flat_  
>  _Then feel it filling your sails_  
>  _And warm on your back_

Hogsmeade is draped in snow and nearly silent. The few shops Sirius passes are closed and shuttered, Christmas displays lingering in the dark windows. He walks by the Hog’s Head, where warm light is spilling onto the empty street. Inside, Sirius can hear laughter and the clinking of glasses. It’s been so many hours, and he is so tired. The light feels like a hand held out that might take his own and hold him for a bit. 

Sirius keeps walking.

From Hogsmeade to Hogwarts takes a good forty-five minutes at a steady pace. He and James have managed it in thirty, running pell-mell down the hill. Tonight, it takes Sirius close to an hour. All of his bones ache and twice he nearly shifts into Padfoot just to escape his exhaustion but it’s too public and besides, Padfoot cannot manage to drag Sirius’s luggage in his mouth.

He makes it to the Hogwarts gate anyway, which is shuttered. Sirius has not thought this far ahead- he has barely thought at all since six that night, when he stuffed everything he could fit into his charmed suitcase and jumped from his bedroom window into the packed snow of the back garden. Sirius is shivering, he realizes, now that he is finally standing still, and his hand shakes when he raises it to the iron gate and knocks at the center beam.

For a while, nothing happens. Eventually, a figure begins to emerge over the horizon growing steadily larger and larger until Hagrid is standing at the front gate, fishing an absolute mess of keys from his coat pocket.

“Sirius Black,” he booms, sounding pleased. “Happy Christmas! What’s you doing here, colder than a Durmstrang winter out tonight.”

“Hi Hagrid,” Sirius says, or starts to say. Not much of it makes it out from between the chatter of his teeth.

“Look at yer- little drowned rat,” Hagrid chuckles, and he gets the gate open. 

Sirius shuffles inside and finds himself on the end of Hagrid’s warm palm on his shoulder, rubbing at the bone in the first strong feeling Sirius has felt in hours. He almost collapses with the pressure of it. 

“Din’t expect anyone coming by tonight, sorry,” Hagrid says, scooping up Sirius’s two bags like they’re weightless and turning to start the trudge back up to the castle. “Wouldnt’a left yous out so long in the cold otherwise.”

“It’s alright,” Sirius says, and it comes out more as “isalight” but Hagrid seems to understand. The half-giant keeps up a steady stream of chatter as they make their way upwards, telling Sirius about the little hot-house he built for the Hogwarts chickens this winter, and the feast that wrapped up an hour ago.

“So good it was, and let me tell you,” Hagrid speaks nearly rapturously. “Cornish hens and the best blood pudding I’ve had since I was half your age. You eat yet?”

Sirius does not let himself think about the aborted Christmas dinner he fled from- his mother’s shrill scream, the smell of smoke. He shakes his head. 

“I’ll get the house-elves to send you up summin nice,” Hagrid promises, and they’re close enough now that Sirius can see into the lit windows of the castle, the trees all covered in their white caps. “Get Poppy to come look at yer face too, nasty gash you got there.”

Sirius had forgotten about the wound after his face had gone a bit numb somewhere in transit. He lifts his hand now to touch above his eyebrow and finds it’s mostly stopped bleeding, crusting over in places. It won’t close on its own- magical wounds never do- but the cold has kept it from hurting too much.

“Thanks Hagrid,” Sirius shivers out between chattering teeth and Hagrid looks down on him, making Sirius feel small and altogether childlike. Belatedly, he wants to cry.

“Yer alright now,” Hagrid says softly and Sirius nods, even as it sits false.

Inside, Hogwarts is just as empty with most students at home and the ones who stayed safely off to bed. Sirius just wants to curl up in his four-poster and fall asleep but Hagrid frogmarches him first to Madam Pomfrey. She’s already in her nightgown when Hagrid knocks on her room door, but she bring Sirius inside her little sitting area, gets her wand out and cleanly heals both the hex on Sirius’s face and the ones on his arm and back that Sirius doesn’t even mention. 

She gets a tight look around her mouth as she does so and it’s clear in her shoulders she wants to ask about it but Sirius must look exhaustedly pathetic enough that she just says, “Come by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll need to do a sealing spell on that,” and lets him head upstairs to bed.

Tomorrow will come with questions, Sirius knows, and he thinks he might have to lie. Are there wizard orphanages he wonders as he takes the stairs two at a time. Peter had told them about muggle government and child protective services, but Sirius had only looked to see if there was a wizarding equivalent once in the fall of his third year, guiltily rummaging through the government section of the library until James had appeared and Sirius had dropped the book.

Sirius doesn’t need another legion of adults meddling in his life. He can spend the rest of break here and then summer he figures he can bounce between Peter, Remus, and James’s houses and then next summer he’ll be seventeen anyway and old enough to get a job or an apartment, and then...

It’s an exhausting train of thought and Sirius abandons it at once as soon as he’s through the portrait door. Hagrid seems to have swung by the kitchens as promised after he dropped Sirius off at Pomfrey’s, and in the common room next to Sirius’s suitcases is a table covered in every Christmas food imaginable. Sirius’s stomach makes itself known for the first time in hours, and Sirius stumbles into the couch right in front of the fire to stuff himself with cold ham and warm treacle and endless loaves of bread.

He’s never been in the common room alone like this, never without the knowledge of James, Remus, and Peter just upstairs. Sirius imagines they’re upstairs anyway, as he cuts his meat into pieces, pictures Remus on his bed scribbling in his notebook, Peter stretched out on the dormroom floor, James running between the beds in his constant, endless energy. The three of them waiting above for him to finish and head up to say hi. It gets easier to eat, then. 

His wounds and his hunger both taken care of, Sirius accidentally dozes off on the couch and wakes up around four in the morning. Outside is still winter-dark, and it seems that while Sirius slept, a house-elf had come by and taken the leftover food away before draping Sirius in an overlarge red fleece blanket. 

Bleary-eyed, Sirius clutches the blanket around himself like a cloak and stumbles upstairs where his suitcases too have been set neatly by his bed. Having slept a bit and fully thawed out, the cuts on his back are finally beginning to make themselves known in a twisted sort of pain, throbbing to remind him that he won’t get any more sleep tonight if he doesn’t do something about them. Sirius first digs around in Remus’s bedside drawer to see if he’s left any of the pain-potions Pomfrey gives out after the moon. When that turns up empty-handed, Sirius instead goes crawling underneath Peter’s mattress for the little glass mason jar of weed and phoenix ash the recreational herbologist keeps there.  He grabs a rolling paper from James’s cupboard and rolls the spliff on his own bed before crawling into Remus’s to get the dormroom window open and slip outside, taking the fleece blanket with him.

The boys had discovered the little ledge outside the Gryffindor tower window during their first year but they hadn’t been brave enough to try and get out onto it until their third. The window itself led to a very narrow shoulder, but if one scooted carefully across it a meter or two, it opened up into a perfectly serviceable ledge where two people could sit comfortably, three a bit uncomfortably, and four if one person was willing to sit in someone’s lap. Sirius was nearly always the one who ended up in someone’s lap whenever the four of them climbed out to smoke together, which he never minded. Touch-monster, James called him, and once Remus had said he was “touch-starved,” but had refused to elaborate. 

In general though, when the four all wanted to smoke in peace they went to the shack, or to the astronomy tower. The ledge was meant for solitary vigils, whenever someone wanted to be alone, or more rarely for private chats between two of them that didn’t involve the other two. That terrible winter of their fourth year, when Peter wasn’t speaking to James after a fight over a girl, Sirius and Remus had forced them both out there and locked the dorm window until James had pounded on it and promised they’d made up.

Sirius now attempts the climb, holding tight to the blanket with one hand and keeping the joint between his teeth. Once he makes it to the ledge, it's a delight to discover that someone’s old warming charm- Remus’s he bets, his were always the strongest- is still holding and Sirius can sink into the pocket of it. Snow has not stuck to the ledge where the charm is and Sirius sits down in the empty space, blanket carefully tucked at the edges. He gets the end of the joint lit with a clumsy move of his wand, what a pleasure he thinks it is to be able to do magic again, and the first hit at the back of his lungs feels like sinking into a hot bath.

Time slows, contracts. Shifts and pulls at him. In the grey dark of the pre-dawn, he could be anywhere. He doesn't even need to be himself.

Sirius sits and smokes for a half hour, feeling his back and his arms gently drift into numbness, taking the stinging pain of the last hour with them. He feels his mind go too, a bit, watching the snow fall silently into the tops of the trees and the blank ground below. All the animals of Hogwarts- the deer and the owls- are all asleep or buried in the snow and it seems in the quiet like Sirius might be the last man alive. He has the feeling, as he sits there on the edge of the castle in the absolute stillness, that he is not just hovering above the ground but clinging to the edge of the earth itself with just the very tips of his fingers, and if he so much as lets a pinky go, he’ll tumble down into an unknowable chasm below him that has been waiting, it seems, years for the chance to finally devour him whole. 


	2. Chapter 2

Sirius rang in the New Year with the rest of the students who’d stayed at Hogwarts over break- a raggedy group of three Hufflepuffs and two Ravenclaws, all younger than him. There was a small feast in the Great Hall, the six students plus the teachers making small talk over at least seven kinds of cheese and an unknown variety of pies, and at midnight Sirius took himself back out to the ledge and felt nothing at all.

He took walks in the snow by the lake and played Gobstones with the two Ravenclaws, who were sisters, and read the poncy poetry books he nicked from Remus’s trunk in the common room by the fire that was kept going just for him. For the first three days after he’d come back to Hogwarts, Sirius reported every morning to Pomfrey in the hospital wing to check on the healing of his lacerations. She’d asked, that first morning, what had happened but Sirius had shrugged and said he’d fallen, and much as she’d gone on about how he could trust her, she only wanted to help him, he’d added nothing to the story. 

Once he was pronounced fully healed, Sirius kept even more to himself for the rest of break, coming down from Gryffindor tower just at mealtimes and if he was feeling restless enough to walk around outside. It wasn’t terrible; Sirius had the distinct feeling at times that he was living out Remus’s dream holiday. He allowed himself a joint a day- both to preserve Peter’s supply and because he had the sense that if he let himself, Sirius would wake up drowning in such a numbing haze that he’d never find his way out again.

The day before the other students were set to return, Sirius stood up from the lunch table and turned to see Dumbledore stand too. The Headmaster followed Sirius out of the Great Hall and once in the corridor turned to him and said, “Mr. Black, might I trouble you for a walk?”

Dumbledore led them through the cloistered hallway at the eastern end of the castle. Through the open windows, Sirius could see the courtyard covered in packed snow, but inside the castle it was always warm no matter how exposed they were. The ends of Dumbledore’s rich purple robes trailed behind him as he walked, and he let Sirius stew in his anxious energy for a while before finally speaking.

“I ask your forgiveness if this is something of a sensitive question, Mr. Black, but is everything well at home?” Dumbledore asked and Sirius carefully kept his face neutral. It was easier than he’d thought it might be- he had carefully avoided thinking about his family all week such to the point that being asked about them felt like a knock at a door where no one had been home for years.

“Yeah, fine,” Sirius said. They made another rotation around the cloister before Dumbledore tried again.

“Madam Pomfrey suggested I speak to you regarding your Christmas,” the Headmaster said. “She said nothing else, I assure you, she has immense discretion as a health professional. But it appears she has reason to be concerned for you and I, in turn, am concerned as well.”

Sirius held his hands tight in the pockets of his robe. “Everything is fine, sir,” he said. There was a small panic blooming inside of him at the thought that Dumbledore knew what had happened, that he no longer had a home. Would they force him to live with his cousins? Andromeda had been well out of Hogwarts when she’d been burned out, and anyway she’d had that muggle to live with. Sirius felt powerless and hunted and kept his eyes on the cobblestone in front of them, throat clenched in breathless terror.

At long last Dumbledore spoke again. “It is my hope that you know you may always speak to me, or to any of your professors, should you need assistance.”

“Yes sir,” Sirius said quickly, blindingly grateful to have been spared, and as their circuit took them back to the doorway that led into the main hallways of Hogwarts, Dumbledore stopped them both with a hand on Sirius’s arm.

“Family can be challenging,” the Headmaster said, and his eyes stood deep behind his half-moon glasses. “But it is my utmost belief they are always worth it.”

Sirius said nothing and, with a gentle pressure, Dumbledore released his arm and wandered back into the school, leaving Sirius to watch him vanish around a corner. 

Sirius woke up early the next day in a combination of excitement and nerves, and so he was dressed and sitting on his bed, half-pretending to read his Arithmancy textbook, when the other three Marauders stumbled in, red faced from the cold and chattering between themselves.

“Oi, there he is!” James cawed, and jumped into Sirius’s bed. He was still in his coat and boots and he shed snow everywhere, much of it landing coldly in Sirius’s hair.

“What the hell, Prongs?” Sirius said but he was already grinning. After a week and a half alone, it was a relief to see them all, to be surrounded by their noise and laughter again. 

Peter stood by the door, fighting to get his boots off and Remus was making his way towards his own bed, unwinding his scarf as he went. He smiled at Sirius and Sirius felt that twist at the pit of his stomach he always felt at the curve of Remus’s smile, the flash of Remus’s two front teeth.

“How’d you beat us here?” James asked, crawling across the bed to pull Sirius into a hug that was more of a chokehold. “We couldn’t find you on the train.” Sirius batted at him and James only squeezed harder and they wrestled a bit, knocking Sirius’s textbook to the floor.

“He can’t tell you if you won’t let him breathe, James,” Remus said and James flipped Remus off before letting Sirius go. Sirius took the reprieve as a chance to knock James around the middle and it was another five minutes before they were all out of their coats and keeping their hands to themselves.

“Did you come back early?” Peter asked. He had made his way to his own bed and was eating a chocolate frog a bit pensively, flipping the card over in his free hand.

Sirius had given some thought as to how he might explain it all to the others, but put on the spot he forgot all of the careful, carefree lines he’d rehearsed in the shower. 

“Indeed I did, Wormy, and I…” Sirius tried, his voice not quite light enough, and the words got caught in his throat. “It all sort of…”

“What happened to your face, mate?” James asked, who was still sitting in Sirius’s bed and who could best, out of the three of them, see the faint scar that still lingered above Sirius’s eye where Pomfrey had been forced to use sutures. 

There was a cold silence then and Remus was the one to break it. “Did something happen-” he started and it was the calculated gentleness of his voice that terrified Sirius enough to force his own words out.

“You are looking, gentlemen, at the scorned scion of the Ancient and Noble House of Black,” Sirius laughed, but it didn’t sound like a joke.

“They kicked you out?” Peter gasped, chocolate frog forgotten.

“Took them long enough, didn’t it?” Sirius said and even to his own ears he knew his voice was too loud, his hand motions too big. “Very few can handle this brilliant wit and perfect face. Just the cost of having it all, I suppose.”

“On Christmas?” Peter seemed unable to believe, and across the room Remus rolled his eyes.

“For fuck’s sake Peter, shut up,” Remus bit out and all three turned to stare at him. “And can you stop joking for one second Pads, honestly, this is really-”

He stopped and pressed his lips together but it was too late.

“It’s what, Moony?” Sirius teased, breathless in his relief at Remus having fallen right into the greatest joke in their friendship. “Is it really-”

“Serious?” James and Peter echoed and Remus grit his teeth as the three of them laughed. Sirius almost thought he’d been spared but Remus Lupin was determined fucker and he pushed on.

“What are you going to do?” he asked and Sirius hoped his shrug looked as casual as he’d practiced it to be in the bathroom mirror.

“I don’t know, maybe bum around between the three of you this summer?” he said, as if it hardly mattered. “Next year I can get an apartment or something but-”

“Shut up,” James cut him off, and he was beaming. “You tosser, you’re moving right in. Mum’s had a room picked out for you since you came last summer hols.”

It was a blinding relief, so staggering as to be nearly incomprehensible. “You don’t have to-” Sirius tried but James wouldn’t let him speak.

“I fucking do, Pads,” he said. “If Mum finds out I didn’t drag you back with me, it’ll be my ass out on the street next.”

Sirius wanted to cry, but it would have ruined all the work he’d done to not look minutes from weeping since the Marauders had walked back in. Instead, he pushed and James shoulder, who got his arm around him in return, and the two of them sparred again as Peter laughed and Remus muttered, “absolute idiots,” but did not interfere.

They caught lunch in the Great Hall and spent the rest of the day unpacking their various trunks. Sirius, who had unpacked when he first came, lounged about the dorm making a nuisance of himself- stealing chocolate from Peter and asking about everyone’s holiday.

“Was it nice here?” Remus asked.

“Flitwick got smashed on New Years,” Sirius said, and did not mention that he’d missed the Christmas feast trying to catch a night bus before giving up and wandering hours through London to Diagon Alley, making it as far as Hogsmeade by a Portkey he could only just afford and walking the rest of the way. 

“He’s small enough I feel like he could get drunk on just a shot,” Peter mused and James laughed.

“Saw him drunk once at a Slug Club meeting,” James said. “Kept teetering about like he might fall over.”

“Not far to fall,” Sirius shrugged and Remus told them all off for laughing. 

There was some push to stay up all night catching up but soon Peter yawned and James yawned and even Sirius, who had done little but sleep and lie still for a week, felt tired enough to suggest they wait until tomorrow night. James nodded, already pulling the covers over himself fully-clothed, and Remus called first in the bathroom.

Their dorm bathroom held a shower, two toilets and two sinks. It was a small space, which didn’t stop the four of them from piling in together if they were in a rush or someone was throwing up, or they just fancied a chat while they washed, but it was better suited for two at a time. Sirius followed Remus in, who was already stood at the sink prepping his toothbrush, and he locked the door behind himself and stepped forward to take Remus’s wrist like he’d been desperate to do since Remus had walked into the dorm that morning flush-faced and laughing.

“Sirius, what-” Remus tried but Sirius only walked him backwards into the shower, closing the curtain behind them so they stood in semi darkness. The shower itself was really only big enough for one and Sirius could feel Remus up against him everywhere, hard planes and shaking slightly, and he used the wrist he was holding to tug Remus ever closer and kiss him against the tile wall.

Remus flinched back, eyes darting around as if he expected James or Peter to burst in, but Sirius leaned in again and caught his mouth this time, his chin a bit damp from having washed his face before Sirius came in. 

“Pads,” Remus murmured and he fell into the kiss. His mouth was as good as Sirius remembered, better even than the memory Sirius had wanked over for most of the Christmas Hols, and he opened up under Sirius’s tongue, wet and a little noisy as they kissed and bit at each other. Sirius got Remus’s bottom lip between his teeth and Remus moaned so softly he barely caught it before Sirius suddenly found himself against the wall, Remus’s hands on his chest holding him back.

“Sirius no, we can’t,” Remus started and oh, how desperately Sirius had hoped he wouldn’t talk at all. “We talked about this- we agreed it’s a shit idea-”

“You said it’s a shit idea, I didn’t agree to anything-”

“It would ruin everything, you know that,” Remus said and his voice did not shake, it hit all of Sirius’s soft places. Sirius refused to meet Remus’s eyes; he knew they’d look the same as they had when they’d first had this conversation last term- sad and a little disappointed. As if Sirius was a dog who’d done something wrong and impulsive, yet again. “If James or Peter found out-”

“Are you planning on telling them?” Sirius said, hard and sarcastic, and in his fingers Remus’s pulse jumped in his wrist.

Sirius meant to hold back, to not look so desperate, but he couldn’t and he found himself falling back into Remus’s mouth again. Remus didn’t stop him at first, let himself be kissed and opened for Sirius’s tongue, met him with his own. They kissed for endless, desperate minutes before Remus pulled back again like Sirius had struck him.

“Sirius, please,” Remus begged softly and Sirius felt violent. “We can’t, you know we can’t-”

“Could have fooled me into thinking you wanted to-”

“Pads,” Remus said, and stopped. His hand was gentle where it rested in Sirius’s. “I know you’re not having an easy time right now-”

Sirius yanked his hands out of Remus’s grasp, pulled back as far as he could in the small space. “If I wanted to have a fucking tea party about my feelings, Lupin, I’d get a girlfriend,” he hissed and Remus only watched him back, mouth a thin line. 

It was useless, it all was. Sirius felt wrong in his skin, wrong in the damp air between him and Remus. His mouth ached and he wanted to punch a wall, he wanted to hold Remus’s chin in his hands.

“I just thought we could get off or whatever, but clearly you’re not on, so-” Sirius bit out, stopped. He finally met Remus’s eyes and if he’d found pity there he didn’t know what he would have done but Remus was looking at him with something between hurt and fear. It made Sirius feel sick and was also the best thing he’d tasted since he’d fled from Grimmauld Place.

Sirius stepped out of the shower and then the bathroom, not even bothering to pee. Peter was waiting on his bed to go in and he hopped down once he saw Sirius walk back into the room.

“Night Pads,” Peter called out cheerfully and Sirius did his best to wave and nod before crawling into bed and shutting the curtains with a quick snap, determined not to see Remus come out of the bathroom after him.

In the darkness of his four-poster, Sirius wormed his way under the covers and turned on his left side, curling up to rest his chin nearly against his knees. Something in him hurt, screamed like a broken bone, and Sirius willed it desperately to shut up and he closed his eyes and did not sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for period-typical homophobia and not great consent

Sirius did not sleep for days.

Their first two weeks back, Sirius found himself lying awake each night after the others had gone to bed watching the light change through the film of his bed curtains. Night turned to dawn in a ghastly grey-violet fade, eeking out the colors from his skin and bed covers, and Sirius watched it all through a fog of exhaustion and restless energy. He managed a piecemeal hour here and there where his body couldn’t help but let him fall unconscious. But soon enough he was awake again, his jaw hurting from where he’d ground his teeth together in anxious thought. 

The thoughts were amorphous and terrifying. Glimpses of his mother’s face Christmas Eve, terror at the summer, at next year. Never had Sirius given any thought to money before but, currently finding himself with absolutely none, it was all he could think about. How would he buy his books next year, his robes? Could he get a job? It was unlikely anyone in Wizarding England would hire him if his parents had made his disownment known. These all felt like problems he was much too young to be able to solve, issues he was meant to place into the hands of an adult and let them handle for him. But what adult could Sirius talk to, and what would happen to him if he did? Some witching hours the nightmares that woke Sirius up were of orphanages that looked remarkably like Grimmauld Place, teeming with dark hallways and angry children. 

Other nights he dreamt about Regulus, his little brother’s face at the dinner table as their mother had cut into Sirius with a mythic hatred, his silence as Sirius lay on the floor of the front parlor, bleeding through his clothes. These dreams were the worst because when he woke up and came down for breakfast, Regulus was just there- right across the Great Hall and watching Sirius like he knew what Sirius was thinking and hated him for it.

“He’s staring at you again, mate,” James reported at breakfast in early January. Sirius was sat with his back to the Slytherin table, but he glanced over his shoulder to find Regulus quickly looking down at his food.

“Probably reporting on me to dear ol’ mummy,” Sirius said, stabbing a bit viciously at his eggs. “Letting her know I’ve continued to be an utter failure, despite the loss of the Black name.”

“Have you talked to him at all since-” Remus started but stopped himself short of mentioning Christmas. 

Attempts had been made since the three had come back to ask Sirius what had happened, but they’d all been the fumbling, awkward attempts of three teenage boys who didn’t actually want to talk about feelings if they could help it, and Sirius had brushed them all off easily. He did the same now.

“If the git wants to talk to me, he’ll come ask me himself,” Sirius said. He put down his fork, appetite gone. “I’m gonna run ahead, I still have a paragraph left on this Arithmancy essay.”

“No you don’t,” Remus said, his tone teasing, and Sirius looked up at him. “I wrote it for you last night, after you fell asleep in the middle of the review you practically begged me to give you.”

“Oh,” Sirius said, feeling flush. He’d passed out last night in exhaustion on top of his charms textbook and had woken up two hours later, unable to go back to sleep but too tired to do anything productive till sunrise. “Thanks, Moony.”

“You just had the conclusion left,” Remus shrugged. Sirius watched Remus play with his food, moving it back and forth across his plate with his fork. He knew Remus was trying to be kind- trying to make up for whatever had happened to Sirius, for not kissing him back. It made Sirius want to punch him in the gut, made Sirius want to kiss him even more.

“You never write my essays,” Peter whined and Remus laughed at him.

“Yes I do, wanker,” Remus said. Sirius did not like to watch him when he smiled. “I wrote your Charms essay last week.” 

“I had already written my outline for that,” Peter said, and Sirius turned to James to find James watching him back, an inscrutable look on his face. 

“Alright?” Sirius asked James softly, leaning towards his best friend. 

James held his gaze. “You tell me,” he said, and Sirius didn’t have an answer for him.

The dreams did not stop and Sirius woke from one two days later- a disturbing playact of Sirus’s mother, covered in feathers and nearly hawklike, taking all the food off of Sirius’s plate piece by piece in a long grey beak and putting it on Regulus's- to stumble down to breakfast. James made his daily report that Regulus was still watching them, but this time as breakfast wrapped up, Regulus stood from his seat between Rosier and Snape and walked right up to where the four of them sat at the end of the Gryffindor table.

“Sirius,” Regulus said, and offered nothing else. Sirius knew what it meant though.

“See you lot in Charms,” Sirius said to James, Peter, and Remus, and he grabbed his bag to follow Regulus out of the Great Hall without another word, feeling everyone’s eyes on his back as he did.

The two Black brothers walked through the swarm of students making their way to their first class, past the filling lecture rooms and across the trick stairs to the large, wrought iron bridge that stood on the western edge of the castle. Neither one looked at the other until they were alone at the bridge’s edge, the window pockets filled with packed snow and the Hogwarts lake glistening below them. And even then it was only a quick glance, a look up to acknowledge they were both here, both listening. Nothing so intimate as eye contact.

When Regulus had first come to Hogwarts, three years ago, the brothers had taken somewhat regular walks together; wandering around the lake in the bright spring air or sitting by the forest edge as the leaves began to change and fall. Their walks had been weekly during Regulus’s first year- almost daily during his first month at Hogwarts- but they’d slowly dropped in frequency since. They were never particularly exciting. Regulus had been terrified as a first year and Sirius- a third year and already comfortable in his friend group and his classes- had been happy enough to walk with his little brother and talk to him about which teachers to take and avoid, which hallways were good to hide in and which tables in the library were the quietest to study at. Regulus had soaked it all up, watching Sirius like he was some sort of benevolent deity kind enough to dispense wisdom to his subjects. Sirius could admit to himself it had felt wonderful- the first time in their lives he was better at something than his perfect little brother, their parents’ favorite.

They’d barely taken any walks together at all last term. Neither one of them much liked to look at the other anymore. Sirius could only imagine what Regulus thought when he looked at Sirius, but Sirius knew well what filled his own head. It made talking to each other an impossibility. 

Now, on opposite sides of the enclosed walkway, Sirius leaned carefully against the metal beam at his back and waited for Regulus to speak.

“Are you okay?” his little brother asked, and Sirius could have split his face open with his palm.

“Fuck off,” Sirius growled, “if that’s what you took me out here to ask-”

“Forget it,” Regulus scrambled to say, tripping over his own words. “I didn’t mean...forget it.”

Sirius stood watching him, his whole body humming with the energy of his rage. As they waited for each other, Sirius unconsciously rubbed at the still-sore skin of his upper arm and he caught Regulus staring as if he could see the scars through Sirius’s robes.

“Mum’s sorry,” Regulus said at last.

Sirius couldn’t help it, he laughed. “No she’s not.”

“She is,” Regulus said again. “She wants you to come back.”

Sirius felt his skin break out in goosebumps, just to hear those words so close to his own deepest, most secret wish. His stomach wrung itself out and Sirius tasted acid at the back of his throat, the urge to vomit overwhelming. 

“What-” he tried, before getting stuck. “What kind of fucking ploy is this? What the bloody fuck are you three trying to pull-”

“It’s not a ploy, Siry, I swear,” Regulus said, his lips blue at the edges from the cold. Sirius remembered him that night, the way their father had set them against each other as always  _ brilliant Regulus, at least one of our sons isn’t an utter disappointment _ and how Regulus had said nothing, had sat and watched as Sirius had called their mother a  _ fucking cunt _ had thrown a dish at their father and had both their parents wands turned on him.

Sirius understood; of course he did. He liked to imagine that if it had all been reversed, if Sirius was the good son, the loved son, and Regulus was the one their parents picked on and picked at until he was mostly bone, that Sirius would say something. But that, he supposed, was what made him the bad son in the first place.

“They blasted me off the tree, Reg,” Sirius said. “It’s over.”

“They put Cassiopeia back on like three times,” Regulus seemed desperate to convince him. “It can happen.” 

Sirius tried to read something of the truth in his brother’s face. He was almost sure Regulus was lying- why, Sirius couldn’t say. Some twisted game he and their parents had dreamed up together to torture Sirius, get him to beg for his place back so they could have the pleasure of denying it to him all over again.

But if it  _ was _ true-

“Write to them, Siry,” Regulus said. Sirius saw the wet film in his brother’s eyes and had to look away. Always too clever a performer. “Just write to them that you’re sorry, and you didn’t mean it.”

“If those fucking cunts want an apology from me, they can-”

“Will you think about it?” Regulus cut him off. Around them was silence, class had started ages ago and the hallways were empty. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”

Regulus looked miserable, clutching at the sleeves of his robes and tearing the strings apart with the ragged edges of his fingernails. Sirius knew he didn’t look much better; he tried not to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror but couldn’t help it some mornings. 

The last time the two of them had hugged had been early in Regulus’s second year. They’d been walking out by the vegetable garden and Regulus- days away from turning twelve, one of the youngest of his year- had started crying. He hadn’t found friends the way Sirius had, always the quieter and more solitary of the two of them, and Sirius knew he was lonely. Back then, Sirius had crossed the row of bright, round pumpkins and taken his brother into his arms, holding him while Regulus got the shoulder of Sirius’s robes all wet, rubbing his back a bit in the way Sirius had learned from James- a hugger by nature. 

Sirius thought now about what it would feel like to take the four steps to Regulus’s side and hug him. It feels a bit like going mad, the distance between them a minefield of lies and clever games, of their mother’s sharp tongue and their father’s steady fury. He was nearly sure if he tried, Regulus might punch him, might rip off some sort of mask to reveal their mother with her pointed canines to bite into Sirius’s skin and tear it right from his bones.

Instead, Sirius turned and fled, trying hard not to break into a run as he left Regulus standing at the center of the bridge. Going to class was out of the question and so instead Sirius took himself on a walk around the outside of the castle, past the greenhouses and through the snow until his body felt numb enough that his brain had no energy to think. Then he let himself finally head up to the dorm to fall into a brief, exhausted sleep.

No one asked Sirius what he and Regulus had talked about, for which Sirius was almost excessively grateful. In turn, Sirius offered nothing but a sudden uptick in cruelty he couldn’t control.

He teased Peter for everything from his sweaters to his awkward stutter until Peter was forced to laugh to hide he was seconds from crying. With James, Sirius was brash and overloud, suggesting more and more impossible pranks and refusing to see reason. Sirius did not talk to Remus at all, purposely talking over Remus’s comments and questions if not ignoring his input outright.

If Sirius was terrible to his friends, he was criminal to everyone else. James had to hold his arm to keep him from flinging stinging curses and bat-bogey hexes at Slytherins they passed in the halls, and Remus twice stepped on his foot to stop Sirius from insulting everyone from their teachers to fellow students. Mary Larkin made the mistake of asking Sirius to go with her to Hogsmeade next free weekend at lunch, and Sirius nearly bit her head off, responding so harshly that Peter was forced to lead her away under his arm as she struggled not to tear up.

More than a week after Sirius’s meeting with his brother, James finally agreed to one of Sirius’s more tame prank ideas- and Sirius was sure it was just in the hopes it might wear him out- and the boys snuck out under the cloak past three in the morning to make mischief. It was a relatively simple prank- sticking charms on various classroom chairs- the trick was going to be teaching the chairs to recognize the color green in a student’s robes to know to activate. Remus had, quite cleverly, designed a charm that could see five distinct colors including the neutral black of a teacher’s robe that would trigger the charm to turn off entirely. He taught it to the other three in the privacy of the dorm and Sirius had been so enamored with the beauty of the spellwork he’d nearly forgotten to be angry, smiling at Remus with all his teeth until Remus flushed and looked down at his quilt. 

Once downstairs, the boys split up to get as many classrooms done as possible. James took the cloak and Peter- one strength balanced with one weakness- and he promised to pick Remus and Sirius up at the last classroom on the third floor so they could head back up to the dorm under the cloak together. Sirius watched James and Peter vanish in the center of the hallway, before turning to Remus and following him into the Ancient Ruins classroom.

It was the first time the two of them had been alone since that night in the bathroom. They worked in near silence, Remus looking up once or twice to correct Sirius’s wandwork with a gentle move of his hand. 

“It needs a circle motion at the end,” Remus showed him, holding Sirius’s wrist between his first two fingers to help guide the movement. 

His skin on Sirius’s was like silk against satin. “A modified epiksey?” Sirius asked and Remus grinned at him in the dark.

“Got the idea from a book of cleaning spells,” Remus said modestly. He’d thrown on a jumper he’d found on the floor coming down and Sirius recognized it as James’. Sirius took his arm back with a nod, moving to the other side of the classroom to start on the chairs at the back.

Sirius was trying not to stare. It was four days before the full; Remus was still in good health, as good a health as Moony managed, but if Sirius looked close he could see the shadow of the moon in the skin of Remus’s cheeks, the soft veins at his neck. Sirius knew Remus was “worried about him,” he’d heard Remus whispering about it to James when they thought Sirius was asleep, lying blank-eyed behind his bed curtains. The care of it infuriated him, made it hard to look at Remus head on. As the two of them moved into the next classroom down the hall, scurrying in the dark with their backs to the wall and their hearts hammering in their throats, Sirius wondered what it would be like to pull Remus in half, to rip him down the center with a roughness that almost sounded like fucking. 

Was this what Remus felt like during the full, Sirius thought as they started at the front of the second classroom, echoes of rage and the knowledge of his own strength holding the filaments of his skin together, and somewhere in the muddle of that mess, his hands- without Sirius thinking it through- had reached out to grab Remus’s beautiful, fragile wrists and were holding him still across Professor Binn’s desk.

Remus looked down at his caught hands without a hint of surprise, as if he’d expected to be manhandled by Sirius sometime tonight and had only been waiting for it to happen.

“Moony,” Sirius murmured, and his voice was rough and low, a vicious whip. There was something of his father in it and Sirius thought he could manage an unforgivable now, if pushed.

Remus said nothing, only held still, and Sirius stalked him around the desk before pushing him against it, holding Remus with his back to the wood. Remus met his eyes and there was the wolf, Sirius knew, in the yellow animal flecks lost in green. Predator to predator they stood together and then Sirius leaned in and took what he wanted.

It was better than magic, to fall back into Remus’s mouth. Sirius knew he was being too vicious- he bit at Remus’s lower lip, at his tongue, dug his fingernails into the sides of Remus’s hips. Remus hissed and whimpered a little into Sirius’s mouth but did not stop kissing him, reaching for Sirius like he was starving, like he was desperate, his hips pressing against Sirius’s own and both of them gasping at the pressure.

The violent shake of Sirius’s rage was roaring and Sirius wondered if maybe, maybe if he could get his whole fist inside Remus, the monstrous thing inside himself might quiet. If in tearing Remus apart, he would finally manage to breathe. He wanted to ruin Remus, to hear him begging and get his body layered into Remus’s skin like a cocoon, like a hug. He wanted, Sirius realized with his right hand tugging Remus closer by the back of his robe and his left holding Remus’s jaw open as he kissed him, more than anything to be held. 

Sirius bit at Remus’s jaw, his neck, left a mark at the juncture of Remus’s shoulder. He felt reckless, wild, Remus’s own clear desperation egging him on. Sirius left go of Remus’s face and brought his hand down to Remus’s trousers, rubbing at the hard press of Remus’s cock until Remus nearly wept in his hair before moving to open the button at Remus’s fly and finding his wrist caught in Remus’s left hand.

“Pads, no, we can’t-” Remus heaved out, like it was hurting him to say, and Sirius did not want to hear it.

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll make you shut up,” Sirius threatened and against his palm, he felt Remus’s cock pulse. Remus was shivering in the tight space between the desk and Sirius’s body. For a moment, Sirius wanted to be gentle with him. 

He thought about their kiss last term, their very first one, and how bright the sun had been. The air had been unnaturally warm and Sirius had been laughing, laughing when he kissed Remus’s open, surprised mouth. Remus had tasted like chocolate and orange peels.

“You know we can’t, Pads,” Remus was saying, pushing at Sirius’s hand with a softness Sirius didn’t deserve. 

In the dark now, the everpresent gloom of the castle at night, something hibernating always in its walls, Remus’s eyes were cut jewels, and Sirius could feel his fear like an aphrodisiac. “You don’t get it, you never do,” Remus was whispering, “I would lose everything, everything-”

Sirius shoved him so hard he could hear Remus’s body thud against the desk. He hadn’t meant to, the brutality always hovering at the skin of his fingertips, and the two of them stood their panting, centimeters apart, watching each other warily.

“Fuck you,” Sirius spit out, Remus’s taste still in his mouth. ”Why the fuck do you have to make everything so bloody dramatic, you fucking pouf.”

Remus stared at him through the paltry moonlight of the gothic window above them. “You do realize,” he said and gave Sirius a thrill to hear the anger in his voice- how badly Sirius wanted them to scratch at each other, ruin each other, “how ridiculous that is to call me, considering-”

“I’m not fucking queer,” Sirius said.

“Of course not,” Remus sneered. “Oh no, this is all perfectly heterosexual, just the paradigm of normal boy behavior.”

“It fucking would be, if you didn’t keep making it about our feelings,” Sirius tried not to yell, feeling trapped in the dark inside the wrongness of his body. “Plenty of mates get each other off, it doesn’t mean shit- but you keep making it fucking...gay, don’t you. Wanting to talk about forever and the friendship like this isn’t just about what we need from each other.”

It was almost too cruel, Sirius knew, could sense in the way the air changed and how Remus was no longer looking at him. But something inside Sirius wanted to push it further, wanted to see how far he could take it before they both broke and maybe that was why he kept talking.

“Is that what this is?” Sirius asked, tasting blood. “Is that why you won’t touch me, because you actually-”

“Shut up, Sirius,” Remus bit out and Sirius did. 

Remus was holding himself, hands gripping his own arms, and he was miserable, even Sirius could see. The urge to be sick was back, Sirius could feel bile at the back of his throat and he didn’t know  _ why _ he was like this, why all of it hurt so much inside of him. 

The room was spinning, or maybe the castle was, and Sirius knew he was barely gripping onto the world. He wished with his whole body to be anyone else, wished just as hard to not exist at all. Remus would not look at him and Sirius knew there was no monstrous thing inside himself. He was the monster, more monster than Remus was, and he hated himself so intensely he thought he might actually just vanish.

“Forget it,” Sirius whispered and he turned tail and bolted from the room. He stood out in the hallway, alone and convinced this was another nightmare before James and Peter materialized a few meters away.

“Did you finish?” James asked and Sirius had forgotten why they were even out.

“One more,” he said and he moved towards James to get under the cloak, his hands shaking where they held his wand. 


	4. Chapter 4

The full moon arrived at the end of January and Sirius considered not coming at all. As it was, he turned up at the shack just ten minutes before moonrise where the others were already waiting.

“Where the fuck were you?” James bit off as Sirius ducked through the tunnel. It had been a pain to dodge the willow and get the knot without Peter or the cloak but he’d managed with only a faint scratch on his cheek. “You weren’t in the dorm, we waited ages-”

“Shut up, James,” Remus groaned from across the room. He was sitting on the broken-in bed with his head between his knees, clenching and unclenching his fists the way Sirius knew he did when he didn’t want to scream. Peter sat beside him, rubbing softly at the space between Remus’s shoulder-blades. “It doesn’t matter.”

James looked at Remus and Sirius could read his face like a letter- worry for their friend and sympathetic pain. Sirius too was worried about Remus, found it hard to look at buttoned-up, carefully stoic Moony hunched over in pain, but something in the sympathy of it felt wrong, like Sirius was too broken to even properly care about other people.

“We’ll talk about this later,” James hissed to him before moving over to help ease Remus out of his sweater. 

Sirius stood apart from the other three, watching them care for each other, and only shifting to change once Remus’s moans became wet and heavy, his breathing morphing into almost a cry.

It was a bad moon. 

This was only their third together so far- he and James had managed their animagus transformation two days before Halloween, with Peter catching on at the beginning of November. They’d done November’s moon in the shack, and then December’s moon they had been brave enough to venture outside and run around in the forest together. There had been another moon in December, during the winter hols, but Remus had managed that one alone at his parents’ house. 

The wolf seemed to sense the tension between the pack; it was angry and violent, snapping at Padfoot and refusing to follow Prong’s directions. They managed to sneak out of the shack together anyway, and once in the woods, Padfoot kept peeling off to hunt a rabbit or chase a scent, anything but spend time with the wolf.

When the hound did seek out the wolf, an hour or two before sunrise, the wolf lunged at him and they fought so bitterly, Sirius had to remind himself that the wolf’s bites could not affect him as an animal. Prongs was forced to separate them, backing Padfoot away from the wolf at the ends of his antlers, and Padfoot growled and whined as the wolf tried to get at him. When the wolf howled, Padfoot howled too- two bitter screams into the empty night. They barely made it back to the shack before dawn, and when Remus changed back he was bleeding from his hands and chest, shivering so hard as Peter wrapped him in a musty blanket that the sound of his teeth clicking was fully audible. 

The three of them got under the cloak to sneak out, brushing past Pomfrey as she made her way with her floating stretcher across the frost-wet morning grass. Back in the dormitory, James ripped the cloak off and got right in Sirius’s face, his eyes exhausted and angry.

“What the hell is going on with you, mate?” he asked and Sirius could only shake his head. 

“Nothing,” Sirius said, and he nearly meant it. “Nothing at all.”

Late that morning, as James and Peter slept through Charms and Potions, Sirius got out his quill and his nicest parchment and started writing what he would not admit, even to himself, was a letter to his parents.

_ I’m so sorry _ Sirius scribbled and then could not manage it, wrenching his quill away before burning the whole letter up in a burst of wordless magic. He left the ash on his bed and curled up in fury at himself- for even thinking of writing or for not even being able to, he didn’t know. 

When Remus returned from the hospital wing, Sirius thought they might talk about it, that Remus might force him to sit down and explain what the hell was going on. But Remus only smiled at Sirius the same as always, and made the same gentle jokes and patient comments and acted, entirely, as if nothing was wrong between them at all. 

If the moon had done anything, it was only to exhaust Sirius, such that it felt easier to avoid his friends altogether than deal with their glances and worried exchanges and grimaces when Sirius hit too close to home. So Sirius took to walking around the castle after dinner and cutting class to smoke out on the ledge, trading both the Bowie and Bee Gees records he was deeply fond of for an eighth with Michael Klint- a Ravenclaw who sold almost everything at Hogwarts and who had, Sirius would admit, incredibly good taste in music. 

Sometimes James climbed out on the ledge to sit with him, and to bum a few hits. The two of them would watch the sun set, and for a brief minute in the warm press of James’s body against his side, Sirius would feel normal again. Like this was third year and he and James had only just discovered weed and muggle rock and thought they might be curse breakers when they graduated. 

“Are you okay, Pads?” James asked once, not long after January’s moon. They were wrapped in James’s shoddy warming charm which always cracked at the edges, and Sirius could feel the winter wind around his ankles.

Sirius inhaled, exhaled. Tried to find the words and came up with only a block at the back of his throat, a weight in the center of his chest. Sirius was fairly sure if he was tossed into the lake, he’d sink.

“It’s nothing,” Sirius said. It was maybe worse than not answering.

James shifted, uncomfortable. “You know we- I mean you know you can talk to us, yeah?” he offered.

Sirius tried to imagine how it might go, talking. Speaking of his parents, of Christmas, was impossible. Just thinking about Grimmauld Place left Sirius shaking. He’d done his absolute best since fleeing to turn the whole night into a black hole, a lacuna in his mind that Sirius never had to examine again. He couldn’t tell James about the letter either, much as he wanted to. James would tell him it was a trap, which it was, and that he shouldn’t do it, which Sirius knew, but then James would also know that Sirius had thought about apologizing, that Sirius was weak and pathetic and so desperate for love he’d go crawling back to the cunts who had cursed and disowned him.

The only thing Sirius could talk about was Remus, and he knew he shouldn’t. The one thing Remus had begged from him was not to tell the others and if Sirius couldn’t do anything else right, he could at least keep that secret. 

“Yeah,” Sirius lied, passing James the joint. “Yeah, I know.”

Atop everything, Regulus had begun to spend more and more time with Snape. Sirius saw the two of them, accompanied by Rosier or Crouch or another one of Sirius’s fucked-up cousins, skulking around the school together between classes and he almost wanted to scream out loud. Around Regulus he did nothing, but as soon as Snape was alone or in class, Sirius had another torture devised for the slimy git. 

He spelled the bottom of Snape’s caldron so it leaked all over the desk and Snape’s robes. He shot a jinx at Snape’s transfigured teacup from the back of the class so it bit Snape on the nose when he went to drink from it. During Defense Against the Dark Arts, Sirius ignored his own partner to hex Snape and deflect the hexes Snape sent back. And in Arithmancy, Remus had to practically hold Sirius’s hand to keep him from applying a complicated curse Sirius had found in the restricted section to the back of Snape’s neck.

Remus’s hand on his own was enough to bring Sirius to standstill, deaf to Professor Vector’s lecture on the importance of a Q in an eight-letter code. Remus’s skin was warm, the edges of his scars scratching against Sirius’s own wrist. 

“If I let go, do you promise to behave?” Remus hissed across their shared desk.

“What do you think?” Sirius muttered back and Remus glared at him but let go anyway, which somehow felt like a test Sirius had failed, but he did not bother Snape for the rest of the day.

It wasn’t Regulus’s fault, Sirius insisted to himself. His brother was lonely, and the cousins were people he could hang out with, who had all known each other their whole lives and who would give Regulus someone to sit with at meals and walk to class with. That they had included Snape in their stupid gang despite his general greasiness and bird face was a mystery to Sirius, but he figured wanker attracted tosser, blood status be damned. 

He tried to talk to the others about it, grumbling about birds of a feather and bad influences at lunch, but James, Remus and Peter were all only children and didn’t quite understand it.

“Fuck ‘em, mate,” James offered as his sage advice and Sirius didn’t know how to explain that he couldn’t. That Regulus was a dick and the perfect puppet of their psychotic parents and Sirius would always worry about him, would always see him as six years old, clinging to Sirius’s hand as they crossed the street. 

“He’s a bloody third year,” Sirius grumbled into his mashed potatoes. “What the hell does Snivellus want with him anyway?”

“Probably cause no one our year is desperate enough to hang out with him,” Peter said.

“It’s pathetic, honestly,” Sirius sneered. “Can’t find anyone his own age.”

“Lily still talks to him,” Remus noted and James twitched the way he always did when someone mentioned her.

“Barely,” James interrupted. “They almost never sit together in class anymore.”

“Alright, stalker,” Remus laughed and the rest of the conversation was lost to James waxing about Lily, and Remus fact-checking, and Peter asking them to quiz him on his tea-leaf readings for his Divs exam later.

Sirius stared across the hall at Regulus, who was engrossed in a book over breakfast, and worried about what would happen to Regulus that summer, all alone in the large townhouse. It made Sirius hate himself, then, for worrying about the git at all. Home had never been horrible for Regulus like it was for Sirius, where their parents fawned over him and promised him the world. But Sirius knew better than anyone that the house was a horrorshow no matter how good you thought you had it. No wonder Regulus wanted him back.

Still, it was a thing that couldn’t be explained and so Sirius found himself isolating further, shrinking back into the corners of Hogwarts and the quiet, dark places where he didn’t have to make any excuses. The library after eleven became a favorite haunt and it was there, alone at his favorite table in the back pretending to do his Ancient Ruins essay, that Sirius spotted the two of them together.

Snape was sat with Regulus, a pile of books on the table in front of them, and Sirius watched them from behind the stacks, a fury slowly building in him. Regulus pointed to something in the text and Sirius heard Snape laugh. Sirius’s quill snapped in his hands. 

He was certain he’d be caught but neither one of them looked up as the hour grew later and Sirius kept staring, hoping the solution would simply present itself to him. When Snape stood from the table. Sirius instinctively did too and that was how he found himself following Snape into the stacks almost without meaning to. The Slytherin was alone leafing through the charms section and he looked up as Sirius stepped into view almost as if he’d been expecting him.

“What do you want?” Snape said neatly.

“Snivellus,” Sirius greeted. They stood on opposite ends of the row, facing one another down, and Sirius was the one to walk over and put himself in Snape’s space. “What the hell are you doing with Regulus, freak?”

“Last I heard, he was no longer a concern of yours,” Snape said flippantly. “Or did only Mummy disinherit you?”

“You know nothing about my family,” Sirius growled. Up close he could see the oil of Snape’s skin, his hair, which made Sirius’s skin crawl and feel vaguely unclean. He could also see the cold grunt of Snape’s eyes and Sirius wished James was with him, before remembering James knew none of this.

“We both know that’s not quite the case,” Snape said. “In fact, I’d venture to say I know quite a bit about both your families- your former blood and your little ragtag found family you’re so fond of.”

“What a bold and complicated way to say I have actual, real human friends and you’re jealous,” Sirius said, performing to hide the nervous twitch of his hands. “And shut up, anyway, I didn’t come here for one of your poncy monologues, git. I only wanted to tell you to keep your greasy little fingers off my brother, or else-”

“What are the four of you doing during the full moon every month?”

“What?” Sirius said, nearly tripping over himself with the abrupt change in subject. Snape was grinning now like he’d trapped Sirius, and Sirius was starting to realize it might be true. He’d stalked Snape into this corner but from the minute Sirius spoke, Snape seemed to have the advantage.

The Slytherin played to it now. “I saw you, this past full moon. Running around the grounds by the Whomping Willow. And then in November I caught you with Pettigrew and Potter too, hovering over by the edge of the forest-”

“You’re absolutely psychotic,” Sirius laughed, stomach twisting itself in knots. “Do you hear yourself? Like a serial killer. It’s overboard mate, even for you-”

“Let’s review the facts then, shall we?” Snape hissed. Sirius felt frozen in place, all the blood in his veins cold his heart beating frantically in his chest. “Fact one: little, looney Lupin misses class every single month since first year, right after the full moon-”

“You know his mum is sick, you disgusting twat, it’s not up to him when he can visit her-”

“Fact two,” Snape spoke up louder and Sirius’s eyes darted around the empty library. “The last two full moons of term- this one and the one before Christmas- all four of you missed class the next day. Fact three: I see you and your freak friends running around just before dark-”

“What the hell are you even implying, Snivellus?” Sirius said. Anything to get Snape to stop talking. Lined up like this, piece after piece, the picture was damning. Sirius almost wanted Snape to say it, to say the word out loud so Sirius could laugh like it was a crazy conjecture. But Snape seemed to smile at him in the low light, clutching his books to his chest.

“I’m not implying anything, Black,” Snape said, and then paused. “Oh. I suppose I can’t really call you that anymore, can I?”

“You don’t know shit,” Sirius snarled. “You know fuck-all. Might as well write for the Quibbler if this is the rubbish you’re cobbling together.”

“I’m on to you,” Snape cut him off. His tone was cool and he did not even look flustered. Sirius would have had his wand out at Snape’s throat by now, but the library had layers of anti-jinxing wards that Sirius had seen the terrible end of enough times. Still, he wanted to badly enough, he nearly tried it anyway. “That’s all. You might have the whole fucking school fooled, but I’m not. I’m not fooled.”

And with that, Snape spun around like he’d practiced the movement and walked out from the stacks, leaving Sirius standing there with his wand in his hand and his heart in his throat. 


	5. Chapter 5

They were sitting out in the bog behind the Black country house. The fog was all over, grey and cloying, and Sirius felt like he could almost touch it. Everything was heavy and thick at the back of his throat as he sat on the felled tree between the peat and the rocks. He could feel Regulus next to him but he could not turn his body, could only sense his brother’s heat.

“Regs,” Sirius said and his voice echoed in the bog. He didn’t know how’d they’d gotten out here. The last time Sirius remembered going to the country house was the summer before third year. All the cousins had come too and Sirius had hidden from Bellatrix- eight years older than him and already seeing Rodolphus- as she’d chased him yelling hexes through the mud.

“What’s- what’s going on?” Sirius called out again. His throat burned and he couldn’t see.

There was a cry out in the bog- a raven maybe, or Regulus beside him, and Sirius shivered and sunk into his knees, crying. Soon their mother would come, as she always did, and she’d tear Sirius apart for taking Regulus so deep out on the moors, he could almost hear her yelling now.

“You’ve ruined everything,” his mother’s voice screamed across the fog, a primordial banshee. “Everything, everything, everything is ruined. Unloved child of hell itself.”

Sirius could turn, suddenly, and as he did so Regulus tumbled and slumped into Sirius’s arms. His brother looked up from Sirius’s lap and his eyes were open and still, unblinking, nothing there behind the irises.

“Oh my god,” Sirius said, or tried to say, but his voice was gone and he sat with an empty throat holding his brother’s corpse. “Oh my god, oh god-”

Sirius woke on the last “oh,” alone behind the curtains of his bed. He was panting as if he’d run the length of the castle and his body shook without his consent. Sirius could feel his heart banging at the lattice of his ribs as if trying to escape and he barely felt real, lost still in the bog. Death was all around him and Sirius would have sobbed if he could feel his face at all.

His vision returned to him in pieces- first Sirius could see his hands, the blue of his veins, then the curtains of his bed and the walls of the dorm around him. Through the gap in his curtains, Sirius spied a soft light glowing from Remus’s own hangings and before he could even properly think it through, Sirius was climbing out of bed and padding silently across the cold floor before crawling into Remus’s bed, shutting Moony’s curtains behind him.

Remus was half under the covers, reading by the soft light of his wand, and he jerked up as Sirius came in. 

“Pads, what-” Remus started and stopped as Sirius threw up a silencing charm with a twitch of his wand, cocooning them in a still well. He crouched at the edge of the bed like a ghoul, like the dog, watching Remus. Nothing was real, Sirius thought a bit hysterically, he was still asleep and this was all still a dream and so, like a dream, he moved slowly up the bed towards where Remus sat, propped up against the headboard.

If it wasn’t a dream Remus would say something. If it was real, Remus would stop him. But Remus did nothing and lay still and Sirius could feel his breathing tick up as Sirius straddled him, hovered above Remus’s lap, reached his hands out to move Remus’s book to the side of the bed and then to hold Remus’s beautiful, still face in his fingers.

Remus was soft and sleep-warm, and Sirius could feel the heat of him through his pants and the bare skin of his thighs. He felt Remus wrap a hand around his ankle, saw him reach forward with his left hand before stopping at the hanging curtain of Sirius’s hair, both of them waiting. Sirius bent double, leaned into Remus’s face, his wide eyes, his slightly sour and held breath, and there Sirius paused with almost no air between their mouths.

“I can’t-” Sirius breathed out, spoke in the language of dreams, and Remus finally, finally, leaned up the final centimeter to touch Sirius’s lips with his own. 

It was a press, and then a gasp. Remus opened his mouth and Sirius tilted his head and they collapsed into each other like flotsam against the crag. Remus shifted under Sirius, twisted in the sheets as he got his hands around Sirius’s waist and Sirius could feel the whole hard length of him, the rub of Remus’s flannel sleep-pants and the bite of his teeth at the join of Sirius’s neck.

Sirius was barely awake and still shaking. The death of the dream clung to his skin, made it hard to get enough air. Layer by layer he tried to replace Regulus slumped in his arm, his head at an unnatural angle, with Remus alive under his hands, Remus zoetic and brilliant and whimpering into his mouth, tongue wet and moving, nails ragged and torn as they scratched at Sirius’s back. Sirius needed more, he needed to be here now, he needed to get all of Moony inside of him-

“I want to suck you off,” Sirius spoke into the cavern of Remus’s mouth, “will you let me?”

“Oh my god-” Remus arched up and he was hard, Sirius could feel him, where they pressed together. At Sirius’s words he seemed to lose something of himself, scrubbing his hands through his own hair as if he couldn’t quite believe it, as if the words themselves had finished him off.

“Say you’ll let me, Moony, tell me I can,” Sirius begged, kissing into Remus who was struggling to keep his eyes open, twisting in the sheets.

“Fuck Pads,” Remus whispered, “oh god-”

Sirius dissipated in the _oh god_ the same as the dream, and for a moment he was back in the death, the decay, his mother on the other side of the veil and coming to kill him. He shook himself like exorcising a ghost but it wasn’t enough, he needed to be deeper, to climb inside and run from this cold hand haunting him, he needed Remus more than anything, more than oxygen-

“I know you think about it,” Sirius was rambling. He kissed down the column of Remus’s throat, bit at his collarbone, tugged Remus’s shirt over his head and nipped at Remus’s ribs where they pressed cold against the thin film of his skin. “I know you lie here at night wanking over the thought of my mouth on your cock,” Sirius spoke into Remus’s hard hipbone, but it was Sirius, wasn’t it, who came into his fist in the quiet hours thinking about Moony and the wetness of his mouth, who peeked at Remus in the shower while Sirius brushed his teeth, holding the porcelain of the sink to keep from crowding Remus against the tile, forcing him to his knees until Sirius came down his throat, marked him as his own.

“God, fuck, don’t make me-” Remus gasped, and his hands shook in Sirius’s hair as they tugged, “you bloody fucker, don’t make me ask for it-”

Sirius did then, getting Remus as far in his mouth as he could. He wasn’t good at it, he’d never tried before, and he kept gagging as he choked himself on Remus’s cock, trying to figure out how to make it all fit. Remus was salty and velvet and sobbing as Sirius licked at him, desperate and wanting it to hurt a little. The bruise of it settled in Sirius’s mind and held him- he was broken, he was dirty, he meant nothing and could do no good.

Remus cried out as he came, the noise bouncing against the silencing charm and settling in the sheets. Sirius was aching in his own pants and still a little lost in the horror of the dream and nothing felt real, not even Remus’s come bitter in his mouth and sliding down his chin.

Sirius wiped at it, swallowed, and Remus wasn’t even looking at him as he yanked Sirius up by his sleep-shirt and reached into Sirius’s pants to pull him off. He’d barely gotten his fist around Sirius before it was all over and Sirius felt himself go, whiting out and bowing like a broken branch, collapsing into the sticky skin of Remus’s chest.

Clarity returned in pieces and Sirius shivered as Remus found his wand by his pillow and vanished the mess. He felt utterly alone, althemoreso for Remus’s body underneath him, Remus refusing to meet his eyes.

Sirius wished he was dead.

His hands, which had been cleaned in the spell, reached up to cradle Remus’s face between them, petting at the skin of his cheek with his thumbs. Sirius leaned in to kiss him, wanting one good thing, and Remus turned his face so Sirius caught his chin, pressing his mouth into Sirius’s palm.

Everything inside Sirius was gone. He was hollow inside as he pet at Remus’s face and watched Remus close his eyes, the whisper of his eyelashes like wings against Sirius’s hand.

“If you don’t want us to do this, Moony,” Sirius said, and his voice was as it was in the dream- hoarse and almost trapped in the sinew of his throat, “why do you keep letting me?”

Remus finally met his eyes. He looked exhausted, tired to the very core of himself. He looked like Sirius was killing him.

“Get out,” Remus says softly, worn and empty, and turned over to go to sleep. 

Since their meeting in the library, Severus had done nothing but torture Sirius. He was subtle about it, but clever too. During Charms, he spelled a moon to scrawl itself in the corner of Sirius’s notebook and in potions he dropped a lock of wolfbane onto Sirius’s cutting board.

Sirius did his best to keep from letting the others notice. He was terrified to spook Remus, who had enough to worry about as the real full moon drew closer and closer, and if Peter thought someone was onto them, he might fall apart from the stress. Instead Sirius bullied Snape back publicly, often with James but occasionally on his own. They spelled his shoes to burst open, turned his hair various colors and lengths behind his back, and in the hallways out from under the gaze of a teacher the three of them threw hexes back and forth- bad ones that could cut or maim- as if it was all a grand joke. 

Remus, if he was with them, shook his head in mild disapproval but did not get involved. He seemed committed to making sure nothing ran amiss in the friendship, smiling at Sirius as if they weren’t slowly picking each other apart, cracking jokes and playing pranks with the others. Sirius wished he’d do something, anything at all, to prove that what happened between them in the dark was real and not some complicated illusion of Sirius’s own crumbling mind. 

The morning of February’s moon, Sirius woke up to the sound of Remus puking in the dorm bathroom. He could hear James in there too, speaking at an obnoxiously loud volume considering the hour.

“There it goes, better out than in,” James said cheerfully, and was punctuated with the most pitiful retching Sirius had ever heard. “Partied too hard last night, did we Lupin?”

“Fuck off,” Sirius could hear Remus croak out and then came the noise again of bile hitting the sides of the toilet. 

Across the room, Peter was sitting up in bed, rubbing at his eyes. “Is Moony okay?” he called out.

“Right as rain,” James yelled back. “He’s just a little, what’d you call it?”

“Moonsick,” Sirius offered. He slid out of bed and made his way across the dorm to the bathroom where Remus was hunched over the toilet, clutching at the sides. James was knelt beside him, rubbing Remus’s back in soothing circles, and he looked up when Sirius came in.

“Should we get you to the hospital wing?” James asked the wretched mass of teenage boy, and Remus shuddered over the bowl.

“Can’t,” Remus said. “Don’t want to miss two days of class and-” but whatever the “and” was meant to be was lost to another round of vomit.

Sirius felt terrible and certain, absurdly, that this was somehow his fault. “You just have Charms and Arithmancy today,” Sirius reminded him. “I’ll take notes for you, git. You can’t go to class like this.”

“It’ll stop soon,” Remus insisted. Sirius watched him lean into the firm wall of James’s shoulder and felt almost jealous. “It hasn’t been this bad in a long time; don’t know why now…”

“You did get The Grim in your leaves last night,” Peter said from the doorway, having walked over to crowd in next to Sirius. Peter was the only one of them to stay in Divination and, in preparation for his midterm, had taken to reading all of their leaves whenever they had a cuppa. 

Remus looked up and caught Sirius’s eye. He looked wretched, hair drenched in sweat, and skin so pale Sirius could see his veins. His mouth was pulled in a thin line. 

“I always get The Grim,” Remus said. “It’s why I stopped taking Divs.” 

“Alright lads, division of labor,” James cut in. “I’ll get ol’ Moonshine to the infirmary. Pads, you get yourself to charms on time so you can take perfect notes for our boy. And Pete-” here James paused, looked at Peter in his teddy bear pyjama set and thought strategically. “Why don’t you run and grab scones for the rest of us at breakfast. We’ll eat in class.”

“Aye aye, captain,” Sirius saluted, but he meant it. He and Peter came into the bathroom to help get Remus off the floor. Remus smelled terrible, of bile and sweat, and Sirius wanted to kiss him anyway. It hurt to remember he wasn’t allowed, hurt worse when Remus flinched from under Sirius’s hands as he helped steady him. 

“Forward march,” James declared, and Sirius rushed off to dress, trying to shake the look of disgust in Remus’s eyes when Sirius had tried to smile at him goodbye.

The three sat in the back of charms eating the raspberry scones Peter had nicked, but they split afterwards- James to a study period, Peter to Divination, and Sirius to Arithmancy. He’d have to take notes for Remus there too, and he was so caught up in making sure he wasn’t late that Sirius nearly missed Regulus hovering outside the classroom door.

“Reg-” Sirius said, surprised, and his brother grabbed Sirius’s arm and pulled him to the side of the hall. Students rushed around them as Sirius looked down to meet the urgent gleam of Regulus’s eyes.

“Did you write to them?” Regulus asked.

Sirius shrugged off his brother’s hand where it still clutched his arm. “I told you, I’m not writing to those cunts-”

“You have to, Siry, or it will be too late,” Regulus said. His lower lip trembled in a gesture so familiar to Sirius, having seen it every time Regulus was hurt for the past thirteen years, that it nearly splintered him. “The sooner you write, the better it will be. You know Mum-”

“Regs,” Sirius said, accidentally slipping into the childhood name. “It’s done. They don’t want me.” It felt too terrible to say, too sour to be left on its own. “And I don’t want them!” Sirius tacked on, getting a bit too loud. “Motherfuckers, evil twits.”

“And what about me?” Regulus said. It hit Sirius in the solar plexus; he couldn’t believe Regulus had even had the guts.

Regulus too looked shocked he’d gotten the words out. They were close in age but he’d always be Sirius’s “little” brother, Sirius would always see him ages four, and six, and seven, desperate for love in their cruel house and confident Sirius hung the stars. He was looking at Sirius now with that stupid lower lip and Sirius’s same black eyes and Sirius couldn’t do anything for him. Not without sacrificing himself.

“I can’t,” Sirius whispered, voice gone, and before he could change his mind he turned and moved back towards the classroom door.

“Fuck you, then!’ Regulus yelled after him and Sirius pretended not to hear it as he opened the door and swept into Arithmancy.

The lecture had already started as Sirius took his usual seat, the one Remus always sat in empty beside him, and fuck- his notes for Remus would be ruined, he’d missed the first part of Professor Vector’s lesson. Sirius got out his notebook, and his quill, but found he couldn’t see the pages well through the wet haze in front of his eyes. Sirius sniffed, tilted his head back to look at the vaulted ceiling and blink, before trying to focus back into the lesson.

He was barely present. His notes were sloppy, he’d have to look over the textbook so he could teach Remus what he’d missed, and halfway through the class Snape jinxed him under the table so Sirius had lost concentration again dealing with getting his feet unstuck from the floor. 

Regulus was at the center of Sirius’s mind, and his stomach clenched and threatened to revolt as he replayed the scene over and over- Regulus begging, his ‘fuck you’- and before long Sirius was thinking about Christmas Eve. 

He’d thrown the plate and it had shattered against the grey wallpaper. His father had stood up then, cutting Sirius’s face with the barest flick of his wrist, and then before Sirius could say anything, could run, his mother had raised her wand and used a Cruciatus the way she’d spell a stain clean.

The pain had been unimaginable. The insides of Sirius’s bones had felt lit on fire, he could see the inside of his skull as he’d sunk to the ground. He must have cried; when Sirius pulled himself together almost an hour later his face had been wet and crusted over. His mouth had been full of blood- his own from where he’d bit through his tongue- and ashes so maybe he really had burst into flames. Sirius had certainly smelled smoke, real smoke, drifting down the stairs as his mother cried that she had enough of him in her house and burned him off the tree. His back had been bleeding too; when Sirius stood up he could see the small trails of it on the hardwood, eeking into the cracks and becoming part of the very house.

But the worst of it, more ruinous than the open cuts Sirius had tried to heal as he stood in line for the Hogsmeade portkey and the loose tooth that Sirius had spit out into his own hand as he’d stumbled through Muggle London, had been the knowledge that she could. To cast an unforgivable one had to mean it, really mean it with their whole body, and Sirius’s mother had hated him enough to torture him at the end of her wand with unimaginable pain until he finally blacked out. 

Sirius had always said he knew he was the least-loved son, had joked about it and wrapped himself in it like a banner of pride. But he hadn’t known, hadn’t let himself really know. Had always believed, in the dark, secret part of himself, that maybe it wasn’t quite true.

And Regulus had watched- watched and done nothing. The edge of him was just there in Sirius’s memory of the night, his face at the table as Sirius had shouted out loud and crumbled to the floor, losing sight of his brother and eventually, everything. Regulus had watched and seen and been utterly silent. 

Maybe he’d even been glad, Sirius thought viciously now as Professor Vector spoke, her words barely a piece of the scenery. Maybe it had cheered his little evil heart to see their parents choose him, reject Sirius so totally. All their lives had been the two of them fighting for one scrap of bread until Sirius had decided not to fight for it anymore. But maybe Regulus still saw him as his rival, his only competitor in the battle for their parents’ favour, and then the absolute twat had the nerve, the _gall_ to ask Sirius to come back to it all, to say _fuck you_ as if Sirius even had a fucking choice-

“Lupin already at his mummy’s?” a voice sneered and Sirius looked up in shock to realize the lesson was over. Snape stood in front of him, just the desk between them, and Sirius stood up quickly too, shoving his books in his bag.

“What’s it to you?” Sirius muttered and Snape, if anything, looked even more pleased with his answer.

“Oh wait, he can’t be, because I saw him heading to the infirmary this morning,” Snape drawled and Sirius wanted to punch him. The violence that lived at the ends of Sirius’s skin was alive and throbbing and he wanted to kill something. Anything.

He wanted Snape dead.

“You wanna know what we do so fucking badly?” Sirius said. Through the haze of his anger, Snape almost looked like his brother. “Touch the knot at the center of the willow. See what fucking happens.”

And with that, Sirius grabbed his rucksack and bolted from the room.

He cut his next class, which was Care of Magical Creatures, and headed straight to the dorm room where he fished out a joint James had pre-rolled and crawled out the window onto the ledge. It was only half past three in the afternoon but the light was already starting to go, moonrise was not more than two hours away. Sirius smoked the first half of the joint angrily, muttering to himself about bloody Snape and his bloody long nose. The weed did a lot to calm his stammering pulse and shaking hands and he watched the smoke trail out into the cold sky, shivering but too bitter to do a warming charm.

As he got to the end of the joint and the high overtook him, Sirius felt his jaw unclench, his shoulders drop. A heavy, leaden weight settled in his stomach and Sirius breathed through it, trying to regulate his own body.

He heard the dormroom door slam open and the sounds of James and Peter stomping inside.

“Pads, quit smoking and get in,” James called out the window. “It’s getting late; we need to go.”

Sirius stood up, a bit dizzy, and carefully picked his way back inside. He found James crouched by the trunk at the foot of his bed, fishing out the cloak, and Peter shrugging on an extra sweater.

“Ran by the hospital wing after class but Moony’d already gone out,” James said, his head buried in his trunk. “See if you can find some spare choccies, looks like it’ll be a bad moon, poor bugger,” he instructed from the floor and Sirius stood stock-still in the center of the room. He had the sensation of pulling several fragmented strings together and then, quite suddenly, the magnitude of what he had done hit him full-force.

James stood and turned around, cloak in hands, to see Sirius frozen. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and Sirius didn’t know how to tell him.

“I,” he tried, stopped. Swallowed. “I told Snape about the tree.”

James and Peter both stared at him. “What do you mean, about the tree?” Peter asked.

Sirius was so frightened, and so high, he didn’t even shake. “He asked me about the whomping willow and I told him about the knot,” he said, in a voice that was not his own. James’s face was slowly shifting, as his eyes grew wide and then narrowed.

“You had better be fucking kidding me right now,” James murmured and Sirius could only shake his head. Through his high, James’s anger felt almost physical, like Sirius could reach out and touch it, and there was nothing to be done. 

“Merlin’s bloody- how could you-” James tried, and failed, to get through a full sentence. He turned to look out the window, where the dark was already coming in and where the moon was minutes away now. 

James grit his teeth, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he turned to Peter and said, “Find Dumbledore. Tell him Snape knows- don’t tell him about the animagi business.”

“What are you going to do?” Peter asked, already getting his shoes on. James dropped the cloak on his bed. 

“I’m gonna try and find Snape before our best friend murders him,” James said, and the force of that slapped Sirius across the face. He stepped forward and James held a hand out to stop him, as if he couldn’t bear to be any closer to Sirius.

“And you,” James said, giving his last order of the night, “had better not fucking be here when we get back.” And with that, he and Peter ran from the room, leaving Sirius alone to stand still between the beds, watching as the light faded from the walls.

Eventually, Sirius scooped up the cloak and left the dorm under its cover. He wandered through the astronomy tower and the fifth-floor hallway and even down to the dungeon where he thought he spied Regulus coming out through the portrait but it was someone else.

His high wore off as Sirius moved through the castle like a ghost. He passed by Dumbledore’s office, anxious to hear anything, but the Griffin was closed and told no secrets.

Eventually, Sirius made his way down to the hospital wing and sat down on the floor outside the door to wait in invisible silence. He dozed off a bit, without even realizing, but woke at the sound of a shuffle to see Pomfrey floating her magical stretcher in front of her, off to fetch Remus. With the door open, Sirius snuck in and made his way to the corner bed they always used after the moon and sure enough, when Pomfrey came back floating Remus in front of her, she brought him to the furthermost back bed and levitated him gently from the stretcher to the cot. Bile hit the back of his throat as Sirius kept himself from fleeing the room through sheer self-loathing, looking at Remus, who was more bruise than boy. 

There had been times, especially in their third year when both Remus and the wolf were going through the worst of puberty, that Remus had come out on the other side of the moon looking like he’d fought his way through the night with a rabid bear. But Sirius could see now that Remus’s hands were bloody mitts- he was missing three fingernails and his arms were covered in bites that bled sluggishly into the white hospital sheets. His nose was broken and his left leg hung at an angle that looked unnatural. Sirius wanted to cry and didn’t as Pomfrey carefully reset Remus’s bones and bandaged up all the open wounds. It took nearly an hour and by the time she was done the sun was fully up and streaming softly into the infirmary. 

Sirius waited until Pomfrey had carefully tied the last gauze wrap and had taken herself back into her office to rest, he assumed, before Sirius crept forward to the chair by Remus’s bed and sunk into it, eyes on the mess of Moony in front of him.

Up close Remus looked worse, if even possible. His face was littered in tiny scars, the worst of them being a terrible gash right through his left eye. Sirius’s stomach turned over and he felt so wretched he nearly left but that, he knew, would be worse.

Eventually, Remus opened his eyes and Sirius let the cloak slip from his shoulders so he appeared at Remus’s side.

“Hallo Moony,” Sirius said and Remus blinked at him.

“What,” Remus tried, but his voice was gone after hours of howling. He coughed and tried again, Sirius barely understanding him through his choked throat. “What happened?”

Sirius almost couldn’t look at him. He wanted to disappear, to undo his very existence. “I did a terrible thing,” he whispered and Remus’s eyes didn’t change.

“Why was Snape there?” Remus asked. Sirius hadn’t expected him to know, Moony’s memories after the moon were usually fragmented scraps- the flash of a rabbit, the thrill of a bite. “I could smell him, it was the last real thing I remember smelling.” He coughed again and Sirius wanted him to stop talking, wanted him to finish, to get it all out between them. “How did he get in, Pads?”

Sirius said nothing, holding Remus’s gaze, and he knew he didn’t have to. Remus understood, had likely understood the moment he’d opened his eyes and found Sirius by his bedside. Sirius saw the whole night spell itself out to him in each one of Remus’s bruises. How Remus had gone down to the willow, still throwing up and moonsick, to change, had waited and waited for his friends to arrive and then, just as he’d realized he’d have to do the change alone, had smelled someone new at the end of the long hallway before becoming a monster he could not control.

“Did I kill him?” Remus asked, eyes closed as if in pain.

“No,” Sirius said, although he did not know. Remus had looked so terrible, maybe he had. Maybe the blood on his face had been Snape’s, maybe Sirius had made a murderer out of the best person he knew.

He could hear Remus swallow, hear Remus’s breath spike and hitch as he struggled to get control of himself. Finally, Remus spoke again.

“Is this because-” he tried, like speaking through a mouthful of sawdust, “is this because I wouldn’t kiss you?”

“Oh my god,” Sirius got out, feeling strangled. “No, I, no. It wasn’t, god Remus, it wasn’t even about you really-”

“What are you going to tell James?” 

Sirius’s eyes, which he’d closed at the last question to get a better handle on the bone-twisting agony he was feeling, shot open. Remus was looking at him, his own eyes a bruise in his sunken face, and Sirius was almost sure he’d heard wrong. 

“James?” Sirius asked and Remus struggled to articulate himself.

“He’s gonna ask,” Remus paused to cough, sounding like he might hack up a whole lung. “He’ll want to know why you did it.”

Sirius could not quite believe it. “You’re scared I’m gonna tell James about-” he paused, unable to actually say it in the light of day. That they had kissed, once last term and then all of this term, that Sirius had tasted Remus’s come and wanted desperately to again. 

He almost felt like yelling but instead his voice came out low and trembling. “I almost killed you and you want me just to promise I won’t tell James and ruin the bloody friendship?” Sirius asked and out loud it sounded even more absurd. “Fucking Merlin, Remus, the friendship is ruined. I ruined it.”

Sirius panted, out of breath like he’d run a sprint, and on the bed Remus was staring at him between layers of gauze, a small, thinning mummy that Sirius may have sentenced to death because he was broken and bad and should never have been born if all he was going to do with his life was just hurt people.

“I ruined everything,” Sirius whispered. He should be crying, Sirius thought to himself, but the tears would not come and so he and Remus stared at each other, dry-eyed, until Remus finally closed his eyes with the softest sigh Sirius had ever heard.

That was just about as much as Sirius could take. He stood up and gathered the cloak in his arms before slipping out of the infirmary and right into the bulk of Dumbledore, who was waiting just outside.

“Ah, Mr. Black,” Dumbledore said, looking down on Sirius through his half-moon spectacles. “Just who I was looking for. Might I trouble you for a walk?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Incredibly grateful for all of the thoughtful and kind comments. I never trust myself not to accidentally spoil my own stories in replies but I see you and love you <3


	6. Chapter 6

Dumbledore led them out by the lake. It couldn’t have been past six or so in the morning and the grounds were deserted, covered in a thick layer of snow. Sirius was shivering without a coat, the invisibility cloak tucked into a back pocket although Sirius was almost sure Dumbledore had spotted it anyway. Dumbledore also made no move to cast a warming charm for them and maybe, Sirius figured, that was the exchange.

“You must forgive me if you should catch me yawning as we speak, Mr. Black,” Dumbledore said as they walked by the old, rusted piers. “I’m afraid I did not rest much last night; in fact I only just finished speaking to Mr. Snape about the importance of privacy and the honor of keeping a fellow student’s secrets.”

Sirius could have wept at the sentence- that Snape was alive, it seemed, and unbitten. And willing to keep Remus’s secret. Three terrible fates avoided and Sirius knew had any one of them come true he would have been tossing himself right now, clothes and all, into the frozen lake.

“Sir-” Sirius tried to respond, but Dumbledore did not seem to be finished.

“I’m at something of a crossroads, Mr. Black, which I’m sure you’ll appreciate,” the headmaster said. “It may not surprise you to learn, but the punishment for attempting to murder a fellow student is immediate expulsion.”

“I wasn’t trying to kill him-” Sirius blurted out, like it mattered.

“No, I’m sure you weren’t.” Dumbledore intoned. He was not looking at Sirius as they walked, both of them making their own, independent paths side by side. “It may also be evident to you why this is a matter I would rather not bring to the school board, who would want to know quite clearly and in a great deal of writing why it is I am seeking your expulsion.”

Sirius stuck his hands in his pockets to keep from holding himself, shaking a bit as a wind whipped through the open field. Remus’s secret, he understood, was saving him now even as he’d tried to exploit it for his own selfish ends.

“So what will you do?” Sirius asked. Dumbledore hummed, as if considering it for the first time, which Sirius was fairly sure was an act.

“I suppose we’ll start with detention, for the rest of the year,” Dumbledore said eventually. Any other time such a sentence would have sent Sirius protesting but receiving it now, Sirius almost wanted to say thank you. “Perhaps into next year as well; I will think more on the wisdom of that.”

Sirius nodded, a bit stiff, and they walked on in silence. Dumbledore led them down by the greenhouses and them up the hill again, towards the gardens behind the castle. All of Hogwarts was quiet in the early morning and thick snow, as if the world itself was muffled. Sirius felt like he hadn’t slept in weeks, like the early grey sky was the very colour he lived in. The adrenaline that had come from speaking to Remus was leaving him slowly, and all Sirius wanted was to lay down in the soft white void of the snow and cease to exist. But he was awake now, startling and blindingly awake, and he let his breath fog out into a vapor as he looked to the cold edge of the cloud-covered sun and thought of all he’d need to do to get his life in some kind of order again. 

“I confess, I do take some responsibility for this,” Dumbledore said after they’d walked a while in quiet companionship. Sirius whipped his head around to stare at him.

“Sir?”

“When we spoke at the start of the new term, I could see quite clearly something was not well,” Dumbledore’s voice was gentle, his eyes piercing into Sirius's soul. “I left it alone anyway. I left you alone, to sort it all out by yourself. And for that I will always be sorry.”

Sirius could feel a lump forming at the base of his throat. He tried to swallow past it. “I think I would have made a mess of everything, no matter what,” Sirius said, and he meant it to come out joking but the truth of it hung in the air between them, heavy and damning.

“We are never simply the sum of our actions,” Dumbledore offered. They turned a corner, coming around by the western wall of the castle. “The choice we make each day is what defines us- to be kind that day or to be cruel. You may have chosen poorly in these past few days, Mr. Black, but that does not mean you cannot choose better today.”

Sirius could not look at the headmaster. He wanted so badly to believe those words true, to see himself not as a damaged spell, a killing curse waiting to go off. 

“You may know better than any student here that there is a war coming, Sirius,” Dumbledore said suddenly, switching his tone just slightly. Sirius shivered in its grasp. “And when it comes, we will each be asked to make sacrifices. Am I making myself clear?”

Sirius wanted to say no, but realized, as he opened his mouth, that he did, in fact, understand. If Dumbledore was worried about this Voldemort business brewing amongst the Pureblood families, then Sirius would soon be incredibly useful. The Headmaster, he pieced together, was playing the long game, wherein it was in all of their best interests for Sirius to finish school, to serve his term of detentions and graduate Hogwarts and then, maybe, spy on his own family for men like Dumbledore.

Sirius could have laughed, to have received such mirror-offers one day after another, as Dumbledore stood there promising perhaps the very inverse of what Regulus had begged him for, not twenty-four hours ago. This time, Sirius knew how to respond.

“Absolutely clear,” Sirius said. His voice was steady and strong and the headmaster nodded as he accepted. It would be absolutely brilliant, Sirius thought, to finally be useful to someone.

They rounded the last bend by the gardens and there, standing in the snowed over cabbage patch, were James and Peter as if they’d been waiting for Sirius to appear.

“We will speak more on this soon, I am sure,” Dumbledore said as they walked closer to where half the Marauders waited. “And Professor Slughorn will see you tonight at six in his office. I believe he wants you to scrub the student caldrons.”

“Yes sir,” Sirius said. His feet did not want to bring him closer but he knew he could not stop walking. As they grew nearer, he could begin to make out James and Peter’s faces, who each looked in equal parts wrung-out and furious.

Dumbledore slowed as they approached, and Sirius could have sworn his eyes twinkled. “I will leave you to your friends; I understand you have much to discuss,” the Headmaster said and Sirius almost begged him to stay. Instead, he nodded and let Dumbledore separate off to disappear back into the castle without so much as a look back.

The three boys stood in a malformed triangle, waiting for each other. Peter stood, wringing a bit at the hem of his robes, and James had his jaw locked, his hands balled at his sides in loose fists. Sirius noticed a scar to the side of James’s forehead, and a bandage around his left hand. All his friends were hurt, and it was entirely his fault- that he had not kept his pain together but let it explode outwards and impale everyone around him.

Sirius knew he would have to go first. “James,” he started, stepping forward, and James met him halfway to punch Sirius square in the face.

The blow was first a shock, and then the pain set in. “What the fuck-” Sirius said and James followed him with another punch, knocking Sirius’s head a bit sideways. 

On instinct, Sirius punched back and soon they were properly fighting out in the courtyard. James hit to hurt and Sirius hit just as hard, punching at James’s side and back and landing one to James’s chin before James got him in the throat and stomach, leaving Sirius to double over.

“Stop it!” Peter was begging, a bit high-pitched, “Both of you, stop. Stop, this doesn’t help anything-”

James swung at him again and Sirius saw red as he lunged to get James around the waist. All of the terribleness of the last two months of his life pounded against Sirius’s skin as he hit and was hit. He tasted blood, he spit it out onto the white snow, and he let James kick him and kicked back. He was a broken thing, a terrible person. All he knew was how to hurt people, all he deserved was to be hurt too and James got in one last, hard punch before Peter’s begging seemed to work and he wrenched himself back to stare at Sirius from a few meters away. 

The two of them stood there panting, eyes locked on each other. Sirius coughed out another mouthful of blood, wiped some of it from the corner of his mouth.

“What the fuck, Black?” James finally said. Exhaustion was evident in every line of his body; he spoke with the weariness of a man twice his age. He was covered in snow, much of it sticking to his hair and sweater, and Sirius was sure he looked the same, maybe worse.

Sirius reached up to rub the blood out of his eyes and as he did so he realized his hand was shaking and wet. Nothing, not a single thing, had been good in his life since December and Sirius was so tired of being tired, tired of being sad and lonely and wishing only to be  _ not this _ .

He thought he might be laughing, but when Sirius finally heard his own voice he realized he was sobbing, finally. The tears that had refused to come for nearly three months came pouring out and Sirius leaned over to get his hands on his own knees and howled from somewhere shattered deep inside himself.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he heard James say from far away and then Sirius was being manhandled back up and then held. It was a violent hug, a touch too strong, and Sirius utterly collapsed into it, letting his head fall into the crux of James’s shoulder and sobbing like his body might break.

James kept him upright and said nothing as Sirius wound his arms around James’s neck and hitched broken breaths into James’s jumper. He could barely stop, crying himself out like a twisted, wet rag, until he almost hung in James’s arms, James’s hand soft and soothing at the center of his back.

“He’s never gonna forgive me,” Sirius choked out into the side of James’s neck and James only held him tighter.

“He will,” James said, all the weight of the world in his voice. “That’s not what I’m worried about.” 

The hospital wing let Remus go after two days. Remus wanted to be released sooner, but Pomfrey worried his injuries would attract too much attention and so they waited until they could be transfigured a bit with no other effects. 

Sirius received all of this news from Peter, who was ferrying information back and forth between the disparate ends of the Marauders. James had forgiven Sirius, had told Sirius he had forgiven him right there in the courtyard, but had staunchly taken Moony’s side.

“We have to make him comfortable,” James had explained and Sirius hadn’t argued, had only nodded a bit like a bobblehead. “If he doesn’t want to see you for a bit, that’s the way it will have to be.”

“Of course, yeah,” Sirius had agreed at once. James had hugged him again then, just as tightly, which Sirius had appreciated and had tried very hard not to have another cry over. 

When Remus had returned, he’d been half-carried by both James and Peter into the dorm and Sirius, who had been sitting in bed and reading, had nodded in greeting and climbed right out onto the ledge without so much as a coat or his wand to keep himself from Remus’s sight.

They passed the rest of February and most of March like that. Sirius was as blindingly polite as he could be, holding doors open and speaking to Remus in class and at meals with the neatest vocabulary  _ would you please pass the salt  _ and  _ I don’t think we add the newts in until the end. _ He spent the rest of his time staying out of Remus’s way, and by default James and Peter’s way as well, skipping a lot of class and hiding in the library until he was reasonably sure the others had gone to bed so he could sneak in and catch a few, restless hours of sleep.

After the last three months of isolating himself on purpose and, Sirius could see now, for stupid reasons, being forced to isolate himself again was a bit maddening. He was so lonely he began to make conversation with the ghosts whenever they passed by. He got on well with the Bloody Baron, which felt like a bad sign, so he started hanging around the second-floor girls' lav to chat with Moaning Myrtle. His detentions kept him well-occupied; after the caldrons had been left sparkling, he’d been passed to Sprout to work weeding in the greenhouses and he often finished around eight or nine at night, covered in discarded leaves and smelling of loam.

Sirius also had a great deal of time to think now, and he made full use of it. He composed and trashed several letters to Regulus before settling on one of just three lines:  _ They will never get better. If you want to run, I will always help you. I love you _ . He sent it to his brother by owl and did not go to breakfast that day as to not see whether Regulus crumpled it up or folded it away. In any case, Regulus did not write back. 

He also composed and trashed several letters to Moony, mostly in his head, none of which were ever enough.  _ I’m sorry _ was not going to cut it, although Sirius wished he might at least get the chance to say it out loud. James intimated he might do well to skip March’s moon, and then April’s, and so Sirius did. He spent those nights as Padfoot, curled up in Remus’s bed, and stared at the full moon in the deep despair of a lonely animal, howling whenever he heard the wolf howl across the grounds. 

In April, Sirius got a long letter from Mrs. Potter on Easter morning, explaining that James had told her about Sirius’s disownment and how she was delighted to have him move into the Potter Manor at once.  _ You are welcome to sleep in James’s room, but we have several spares and any one of them might be a good fit for you, should you want your own space,  _ she wrote in the same, looping handwriting of her son.  _ Jamie said you couldn’t take much, so I have bought a bed and new sheets and several sweaters and robes and such before Jamie’s father had to stop me. You’ll see what you like, I suppose, and we can donate the rest. _ Sirius read the letter over breakfast, where he sat at the very end of the table, and did his best not to cry into his oatmeal. He wrote back a long and thorough thank-you letter, and Mrs. Potter answered with a short note of  _ We cannot wait to take you home with us this summer. _ That one, Sirius did get a bit wet.

By May, the grounds had almost entirely bloomed, and sunset came later and later by degrees. James had begun taking walks with Sirius during their overlapping free period, which helped a lot with Sirius’s loneliness even if they did not talk much, and Peter seemed cheerier with every ferried note. James also passed along a sacket of gold that his parents had sent over and demanded he give to Sirius, which Sirius had politely refused and then been forced to accept. He’d promptly used a third of it to settle all his debts around the castle and then, because he felt he really deserved it, buy an ounce off Klint and take it to the roof. 

It was there that Remus found him, halfway through his second joint.

“Thought you might be out here,” Sirius heard Remus’s voice call from inside the dorm. He startled, nearly chucking the joint into the air below, and scrambled to the edge of the ledge to see Remus just inside the window, leaning out.

“Shit sorry, did you want the roof?” Sirius floundered. He hadn’t had a chance to look closely at Moony in months and just the sight of his eyes had Sirius feeling dizzy and unsure.

Remus smiled at him, and that was utterly too much. “I was looking for you, idiot,” Remus said and he lifted himself up through the window with a bit of a struggle. Sirius knew his knee was still quite fucked from the last moon, Peter had passed that on, and he reached out his hand instinctively to help before pulling it back. 

Remus struggled for another minute, refusing to ask for assistance, and finally Sirius thought  _ fuck it _ and offered out his hands. Remus took them, his skin against Sirius’s skin a revelation, and together they got back to the ledge, settling on opposite sides but still quite near each other in the limited space.

Sirius offered Remus the rest of the joint and he took it with a small word of thanks, relighting it and inhaling. For several long minutes that was all they did, sit beside each other in silence and smoke, the passing of the joint between them their only contact.

Finally, Sirius had to try. “Moony,” he started, his voice small, “I am so-”

“Why did you kiss me?” Remus asked, cutting him off. He was looking out onto the forest below them, the great green courtyard, and Sirius could only stare at the side of his face.

“That first time, before the hols,” Remus clarified. He held the joint between his fingers, hands balanced on his upturned knees. “You never explained and I...I wondered.”

Sirius thought of how to answer. It had been mid-December, just three days before the break. He and Remus had been alone, which hadn’t been odd at the time but now was an experience Sirius hadn’t had in months. They had been sitting in Remus’s bed, Remus trying desperately hard to help Sirius understand a T-R-X Arithmancy code, and Sirius had just looked over at him and-

And Moony’s hair had been gold in the winter sunlight. And Moony’s eyes had been kind and a little amused at Sirius’s failure. And Moony’s mouth and been open and gentle as he told a terrible joke and all Sirius had wanted was to kiss him and-

And so he had. Sirius hadn’t spent any great amount of time imagining it beforehand, but if he had, he would have pictured it just the same. Both of them laughing, Remus tasting like the fancy chocolate he hid from the rest of them. The air coming in from the open window warm and loving. Sirius had felt loved.

Afterwards, he’d smiled and let out a broken sort of giggle, and Remus had looked at him like he’d been shot. Everything had gone cold in Sirius then, the warmth of the day forgotten, as Remus had stood up from the bed, held a hand to his mouth and muttered, “I need to-” before fleeing the room.

They’d passed the next two days in a cautious, uncomfortable silence, Sirius spending his nights staring at the closed curtains of Remus’s four-poster, before Remus had finally crawled into Sirius’s bed midnight before the break, thrown up a silencing charm, and the two of them had fought bitterly- Sirius an unstoppable force, Remus an immovable object. Remus had said it would ruin everything, Sirius had promised it didn’t have to mean anything, and at the end of it all Remus had taken the last word with, “Grow up, Pads,” before slipping from the bed and into his own.

Sirius would think about that kiss all winter break, would hold it in his eyes and hands as his mother tortured him at the end of her hate, and maybe that’s when it had gotten a bit twisted in his mind- the love and the hate. Remus’s mouth and care just out of his grasp like all the other wonderful things he had no right to, could never deserve.

“I don’t know,” Sirius said now, on the roof. He looked at Remus who was still not looking back, then turned to stare at the grounds. “You looked beautiful.”

He heard Remus laugh, which hurt, so he said, “It’s true. You looked like magic.”

“That’s kind of you,” Remus said back, which was such an old-man thing to say, and so Remus-like, that Sirius laughed too.

“I think I’m in love with you,” Sirius said then, hugging his knees to his chest. He’d realized it during his loneliest days in March and had held onto it as the nicest thing he owned. His love for Remus. Proof, maybe, he wasn’t just a collection of bad thoughts and poor impulse control.

Remus went still next to him. “You have a funny way of showing it,” he said quietly, and the two of them sat silent in the terrible, bitter truth of that.

Finally, Sirius tried again. “Everything was going wrong,” he spoke into his knees. “You, and Snape, and Regulus wanted me to- it doesn’t matter now though- I just. Nothing felt real, really. I wasn’t even really here.”

Remus hummed a bit. “Are you here now?” he asked, which was such a spectacularly good question, Sirius couldn’t answer it for a while.

“I think so,” Sirius said at last. “More than I was, before. It helps a lot, talking to you."

Remus said nothing, and Sirius knew if they were going to have this out, he’d have to do it. 

“I know I’m not a good person-”

“Pads-”

“I’m not, and I know I’m not,” Sirius forced out. “I’m cruel and I don’t think. When they...when the hat put me in Gryffindor I thought it meant I wasn’t like...them. The rest of my family. But I guess the hat got it wrong.”

“Sirius,” Remus said, and Sirius was sure he was imagining the tremble in his voice. “You’re not a bad person.”

Sirius made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob, but Remus ignored it.

“I don’t...Look. It isn’t...it’s not fair for me to have to be the one to do this; not now,” Remus spoke, his voice steady and cool and softer than new snow. “I am still really angry at you. But I know you. And you are not your family. You never were.” Remus paused here, and Sirius knew without seeing him that he was picking at the skin around his thumb. A Moony habit. “It’s why they’re so awful to you, I think.”

Sirius couldn’t look at him. He wanted so badly to believe Remus, to feel redeemed by Remus’s careful, kind words. But Remus did not know all of it, the last terrible piece of evidence.

“Can I tell you the worst bit?” Sirius asked. “You can’t tell the others.”

“I wouldn’t,” Remus promised.

“I really wanted them to love me,” Sirius said, and it was clear who “they” were, the specters of his parents now between them. “Even after everything. Even after the worst things they could have done. Isn’t that sick?”

“It’s not sick,” Remus said and at last he turned and held Sirius’s gaze. “It’s not sick at all.”

The double-meaning of it all became clear to Sirius. He felt empty and hollow, and he ached just being near Remus like this again, after he’d almost come to accept he might never have it. 

“I am so sorry, Moony,” he said, his whole heart in his words.

“It was a terrible thing to do.”

“It was, it really was, I’m so sorry,” Sirius begged.

Remus nodded, just the smallest tilt of his head but Sirius caught it. “I know,” he said and it was absolution at last.

They sat in the perfect hush of it, the steady pause its own benediction. There was the sound of Remus relighting the joint, where it had gone out in his hands, and then the hitch of his inhale, his long exhale. 

“I was scared,” Remus offered suddenly, surprising them both it seemed. “I didn’t- you three are all I have in the world. You, James, and Peter. I thought if we...if it went wrong, I’d lose all of you. I’d lose everything I had.”

Sirius nearly couldn’t believe it. “I don’t have anyone else either, you know,” he said. In February, he might have said it coldly, played it like a trump card. Now he was gentle, not wanting to hurt Remus. “I’d lose it all too. But it was always going to change, I think.”

“It was silly to fight it,” Remus nodded but it was Sirius’s turn to object.

“No, it wasn’t,” he promised. “I went about everything arse-backwards. I was an idiot.”

“You often are,” Remus smiled, and Sirius felt lit up. 

It was too much too soon, Remus grinning at him and talking to him, Remus promising he was a good person despite and because, and so Sirius looked down at the blurry edges of the cloistered courtyard to the east and thought about what Dumbledore had said to him at the beginning of the term. Family could be challenging, the Old Man had said, but worth it, and finally Sirius understood what he’d meant.

This was his family. James and Peter. Remus, who he had hurt beyond words and who still sat next to him now, looking him in the eye. They were the family Sirius had, the luckiest thing in the world still left to him. Sirius would be the dog for Remus and the spy for Dumbledore and he would earn this family and its unconditional love. It was only a matter of learning how.

The sun was going down and the two of them turned to watch it. Eventually, Remus sighed and leaned against Sirius’s arm, letting his head rest in the curve of Sirius’s shoulder. Sirius could have flown, could have sung or maybe managed a Patronus. All he did though, was let his own head fall the half-centimeter, resting the side of it against Remus’s, and together they sat through the coming dark. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year!  
> I really want to just say thank you for all of the love and comments. I haven't written fic in a long time and it was scary to come back to it this year but I've truly received nothing but positivity and kindness. I hope your new years are better than this past one and full of people who love you <3


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